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FREDA UTLEY, CRUSADER FOR TRUTH AND FREEDOM

Britain and Japan, Biographical Portraits,

Editor, Hugh Cortazzi, Volume 4, London, Japan Society,  2002  Swirehouse, 59 Buckingham Gate, London SW 1E6Aj Email: info@JapanSociety.org.uk       http://www.JapanSociety.org.uk    31st out of 34 biographies

by   Professor D. A. Farnie, University of Manchester, Ret.

Winifred (Freda) Utley (1899-1978) was the second child of Willie Herbert Utley (1866-1918) and Emily Williamson (1865-1945). Her father was a socialist journalist and her maternal grandfather a freethinker, a republican and a manufacturer in Manchester. Plain-featured, short-sighted and hard of hearing, Freda remained a being born to believe. Educated in a rationalist and humanist mode, she was brought up to be a conscientious atheist and to see religion as only the shield of tyranny, intolerance and cruelty. Hot for certainties in life, she became imbued with an abiding passion for freedom and justice which proved as strong as any religious fervour. She grew into a thoroughly modem woman, emancipated from the traditions of the past but retaining a tough Puritan core.

From her education in Switzerland, she acquired an international outlook. She never believed in the particular wickedness or virtue of any one people, race or nation or in the intrinsic superiority of any race or nation to another. She never became much of a feminist and was saved from becoming ‘the type of unsexed, frustrated or embittered woman who provides dynamic energy to all movements for the regimentation of mankind’ such as Beatrice Webb or Eleanor Roosevelt.  Aspiring to liberate mankind from immemorial oppression, she sought to usher in, through political activity, a new era of human freedom.

In 1923 Freda graduated from King’s College, London, with first class honours in history. She undertook research under Norman H Baynes (1878-1961), submitted a thesis on ‘The social and economic status of the Collegia from Constantine to Theodosius 11’ and graduated in 1925 as an MA with distinction. She pursued her research at the London School of Economics under Charles M Lloyd (1878-1946), Foreign Editor of the New Statesman. There she worked for two full years on Eastern competition with the Lancashirecotton industry. She was confidently expected to become as distinguished a woman economic historian as Eileen Power (1889-1940). The general strike of 1926 proved to be ‘the turning point of my early political development’, leading her into the Communist camp.2 As the vice-president of the University Labour Federation she visited Russia, ‘the Land of Promise’ (JuneSept. 1927). ‘To me it seemed that Russia had unlocked the gates of Paradise to mankind.’3 On her return she became a member of the Communist Party (1927-30). In 1928 she travelled through Siberia to China and Japan. In Tokyo she undertook for nine months pioneer field-work into economic history, studying the bases of competition by Japan and India with Lancashire. That period she always remembered with an aching nostalgia as the happiest year of her life. She sought to avoid being ‘overwhelmed by Japanese courtesy and hospitality’ 4 and praised ‘the incredible industry, devotion to their children and natural cleanliness of the poorer Japanese.’ 5

 

Her pioneering articles on comparative labour-costs in Japan and Lancashire established her reputation as an authority upon the cotton industry.6 Lancashire and the Far East (193 1) embodied the full fruits of her research in a detailed empirical study, supported by 112 tables of statistics. The book was intended to fulfill an educational function and to instruct the employers of Lancashire in the irreversible change in conditions in the world market since 1914. Freda was primarily concerned with labour conditions and labour costs. She showed that labour costs of production in Japan were one half of those in Lancashire in spinning and less than one half thereof in weaving. She concluded that the disparity in labour costs was so enormous that no reduction in labour costs in Lancashirecould ever restore its competitive capacity in the markets of the Far East. The book was limited in value by its patently propagandist purpose and by its lack of sympathy with employers. Freda condemned British employers for never having paid a living wage to the majority of their workers. She also concluded that mill-girls in Japan clearly hated heir way of life. 8 She intended the work to form a contribution to the study of modem imperialism and indicted British policy in India as responsible for the impoverishment of its population. She refused to modify that conclusion when urged to do so. William Beveridge, the Director of the L.S.E., thereupon revoked his decision to permit the publication of the work under the imprint of the School. The book was published by Allen & Unwin and was translated twice into Russian (1931, 1934) and into Japanese (1936).

Freda had made two fateful decisions. In 1928 she married a Russian citizen, Arcadi Berdichevsky. In 1930 she emigrated to the USSR where she lived for five and a half years in Moscow. There she served in succession as a member of the Anglo­American section of the Comintern and as a textile expert at Promexport and at the Commissariat of Light Industry. After the publication of her monograph she became in 1932 a senior scientific worker at the Institute of World Economyand Politics of the Academy of Sciences. She studied the economic and political situation in the Far East, in order to provide theoretical foundations for policy decisions. Freda had already become suspicious of Soviet ‘socialist’ society after meeting its representatives in the Tokyo embassy in 1928. In Moscow she speedily became disillusioned with the Soviet regime but kept a half-hitch upon her tongue throughout her years in ‘the Hell of Communist tyranny.’9 Then on 11 April 1936 her husband was arrested and was sentenced to five years in prison. Freda never saw Arcadi again and left the USSR ten days later (fearing that her baby son might be prohibited from leaving Russia, ed) ‘with my political beliefs and my personal happiness alike shattered’. 10 Years were to pass before she again became free in mind and in spirit.

Japan’s Feet of Clay had been written in Moscow from a Marxist perspective and was published in November 1936. Launched with a sensational title and inspired by a propagandist bias, the book was written with a profound religious fervour and was intended to shock readers into acquiescent agreement. It was based upon three years of research and access to a wide range of English-language sources as well as to the eight-volume work, Le Japon, Histoire et Civilisation (1907-23) by Antoine Rous de laMazaliere(1864-1937). Freda compared Japan to Tsarist Russia as it was in 1900 and described it as ‘a colossus with feet of clay’ and as ‘Fascism’s weakest link’. I I Her intention was to undermine the myths about Japan propagated by its admirers, to explode the idea of its invincibility and to reveal the weakness of the foundations of the Japanese State. She therefore emphasized its limited resources in coal, iron and oil, ie. in the raw materials essential to the development of modem industry. External expansion was necessary not only to supplement native resources but also to moderate the domestic conflicts endemic within society. ‘The real Japan is a seething cauldron of misery and injustir-e, social hatreds, revengeful passions, hysteria and chauvinism; a country of continuous conflict… Japan is a powder magazine full of mad hatred of the West.’12 She accepted the view of the Koza-ha school of historians who argued that the restoration of 1868 had been an incomplete revolution. 13 The complicity of the Western powers was condemned for supplying the warlike materials necessary to Japanese expansion. Freda urged the imposition of economic sanctions, which she thought would precipitate the collapse of Japan within a few weeks. 14

 

The book was praised in London for ‘its comprehensive knowledge of Japan and its passionate faith in a cause’ and for presenting ‘a complete picture of a very strange country’ which ‘can only be rightly understood through the study of anthropology’. 15 It was however severely criticized by the geographer J E Orchard for its exaggerated assertions and by I Clunies-Ross of Sydney as ‘unnecessarily insulting to all Japanese, except those whose political sympathies are akin to her own.’16 The recommendation to impose sanctions was rejected in the USA as an invitation to an ‘imperialist adventure’, obliging the UK and the USA to cut off their nose in order to save China’s face. 17 The book was undoubtedly unbalanced in so far as it failed to recognize the real sources of Japan’s national strength. 18 It was roundly criticized by a Japanese economist for the abundance of its incorrect, misguided and incorrect information.19 Banned in Japan, the book became a best-seller in England and in the USA, being twice reprinted in January and February 1937. In September 1937 Faber & Faber printed it in a second and cheaper edition, with an extra chapter of fourteen pages on the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 and with an advertisement in bold type on the dust jacket ‘This book is banned in Japan.’ As an expose the book proved to be comparable to Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927). The Japanese held the author to be largely responsible for the initiation of a boycott of Japanese goods in America.20 The book was translated into five foreign languages, French, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and above all, Chinese. Tens of thousands of copies circulated in China and earned the author golden opinions as a ‘great friend of China’. Thus its commercial success more than fulfilled the hopes of Freda, saving her from destitution.Two more books on Sino-Japanese relations followed in quick succession. Japan Can Be Stopped (193 7, 64pp.) was written in collaboration with David Wills and was published by the News Chronicle. It also appeared in a French translation, sponsored by the China delegation to the League of Nations. That translation was circulated by H. H. Kung to the delegates to the Brussels Conference of the signatories of the Nine­Power Treaty of 1922 which followed the outbreak of war in 1937.21 Japan’s Gamble in China (1938) was described by the author as ‘a short book’ of 302 pages, being completed in six weeks and favoured with an introduction by Harold Laski of the LSE. Therein Freda described Japan as ‘a police state, governed by a bureaucracy wedded to a plutocracy’ and criticized the argument from over­population as an excuse for Japanese aggression.22 She re-emphasized the historic significance of the conflict. ‘This war is a war to make or break Japan.’23 She had begun to believe that the next world war would break out in the East rather than in the West. She began to make a transition from the study of Japan to the study of China, which had occupied only a single chapter in her monograph of 1931. Professing her belief in the ‘absolute sincerity’ of the Chinese Communists, she portrayed them as agrarian reformers, a view she later repudiated. ‘Today Communism in the Far East stands for agrarian revolution, not the dictatorship of the proletariat’.24 Once more she urged the imposition of economic sanctions by the UK, the USA and the Netherlands. The book ushered in a new phase in Freda’s career: it enabled her to secure an appointment as a war correspondent for the News Chronicle and to complete a major study of the war for publication in June 1939.

China at War (1939) was based upon a stay of three months in China (July-Sept. 1938), upon two trips to the front line and upon many conversations with national leaders. In the temporary capital of Hankow Freda became one of the forty foreign correspondents who prided themselves upon remaining the ‘Hankow Last Ditchers’. Together with Agnes Smedley (1892-1950), ‘Freda Clayfoot Utley’ became ‘the centre of a high-powered, tight-knit social circle of diplomats and journalists.’25 Freda herself served as ‘the flame, uncontrolled and forever attracting all, instinctively and unconsciously’.26 Her time in Hankow remained as memorable as her sojourn in Japan in 1928-29. ‘Never had I known, or would know again, people I liked so well, felt so akin to and from whom it was so sad to part.’27 Freda re­iterated her negative view of the Japanese as ‘an under-nourished nation of robots’ and ‘the greatest menace to civilisation of any nation on earth’ by virtue of their C savage, simian efficiency.’28 Together with Agnes Smedley, she revealed the terrible condition of the wounded Chinese soldiers, criticized the medical administration of their army and campaigned for help for the Chinese Red Cross Medical Commission.

In October 1938 Freda returned from Shanghai to San Francisco but was refused landing rights in Yokohama, so becoming newsworthy all over the world. Entering by the western back-door into the new and democratic society of the USA, she discovered that ‘America came close to my vision of the good society.’29 Her first article in an American paper was published in San Francisco.30 Thereafter she addressed meetings sponsored by the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression and travelled from coast to coast, urging an end to war supplies to Japan. Returning home to England, she was accepted as an authority upon the USSR and the Far East.31 Her books on Japan were cited by G E Hubbard (1885­1951) as authoritative, although they were never mentioned by G C Allen (1900­82).32 China at War won Freda much respect for the objectivity of its reporting as well as for her courage in facing ‘death in terrifying shapes at close quarters’.33 Unfortunately the book was received with less enthusiasm thanJapan’s Feet of Clay and was indeed utterly neglected in the West, being overshadowed by the gathering storm of World War 11.

The series of four books (1936-39) dealt ostensibly with the Far East. They were also conceived in terms of a covert personal agenda and formed part of Freda’s desperate campaign to secure the release of her beloved husband. First, she hoped to establish her reputation in England in order to enhance her bargaining-power.34 Secondly, she wished to prove that she was a wholly reliable Stalinist-line Communist and that Arcadi should therefore be freed to rejoin her. Thus Japan’s Feet of Clay adopted a Stalinist type of analysis in accordance with the Comintern thesis of 193 1. China at War reflected the Stalinist version of the new united front between Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Communists.35 Freda could also have adopted coded language and may well have meant the USSR when writing about Japan in relation to the outward conformity of the population to the State creed and to the expressions of enthusiastic loyalty made under a tyrannical government.36 Her campaign proved ‘intellectually and psychologically terribly frustrating’ and a total failure. The Soviet ambassador to the USA Konstantin Umanskii, declined forcefully in 1938 even to see Freda in Washington (‘That bitch! Never!). 37

Freda had agreed with her friend Bertrand Russell in approving the Munich policy of Neville Chamberlain, who thought an agreement with Hitler was more likely to preserve the British Empire than an alliance with Stalin. She was deeply disturbed by the Russo-German pact and the outbreak of war in 1939, ushering in the prospect of the unchecked expansion of Communist influence in Eastern Europe. ‘National Socialism, Red or Brown, may be the new society which we cannot escape … The democratic sun is sinking.’39 Her foriner membership of the Communist Party barred her from employment either in the Foreign Office or in the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. She therefore emigrated at the end of 1939 to the USA. ‘My decision to leave the Old World for the New was the best I ever made.’40 In New York she published in September 1940 her most important book.

The Dream We Lost. Soviet Russia Then and Now was one of the most bitter contributions ever penned to the literature of disillusion. Freda offered her own testimony to the public as ‘the only Western writer who had known Russia both from inside and from below, sharing some of the hardships and all the fears of the forcibly silenced Russian people.’41 Written more in hatred than in sorrow, the book contained a searing indictment of life endured in a virtual hell of human suffering under ‘a savage and barbarous Asiatic despotism.’42 Freda had shared in ‘a comradeship of the damned’ within a ‘vast prison house’ which had become ‘a purgatory of our own choosing.’43 The totalitarian tyranny of ‘the Knouto-Soviet State’ had created ‘sullen apathy’ ‘stupified servility’ and ‘a more stultifying and soul-destroying system than any previously experienced by the sons of man.’44 The Soviet way of life was one pervaded by a ‘storm of terror, hate, regimented sadism, hunger, cold and wretchedness and … nauseating cant and hypocrisy.’45 The book was didactic in purpose, like all of Freda’s works. It was inspired by the mad rush of intellectuals in the West ‘toward a world which will be as horrible as Russia’46 and was intended to teach ‘the plan-mad liberals of the Western world that Russia’s reputedly planned economy is a myth.’47 In the third part of the book 84 pages were devoted to a perceptive comparison of Soviet Russia with Nazi Germany, so paving the way for many imitators. In the conclusion Freda advocated a negotiated peace between Hitler and England, even at the price of recognizing German hegemony over the Continent.48 The alternative was the continuation of a mutually destructive war until Europe had been made safe for Stalinism.

The book was deeply moving and highly provocative, constituting the author’s most ambitious and personal testament. it failed however to sell widely or to break through the sound-barrier established by the left-wing controllers of the mass media. It was flatly rejected by Freda’s English publishers, Faber & Faber, despite her readiness to eliminate the controversial Third Part, a concession which she had declined to make to Beveridge in 1930. The publication of The Dream We Lost nevertheless marked the beginning of a new phase in Freda’s career as a dedicated anti-Communist. She had been educated politically as by no other experience and had recognized that Communism was in effect a substitute religion.49 ‘Never in my life have I seen a woman in whose heart and mind every hope on earth has been slain as has hers. She used to be a leading British Communist; now [she is] a black­minded cynic. She believes in nothing at all.’50 Eight years after its original publication the book appeared in an abridged version, omitting the Third Part, as Lost Illusion(1948). The revised edition was widely acclaimed in England and in New York and was translated into several languages, including Danish and Swedish in 1949. It was distributed in paperback form by the US Information Service and was reprinted in America in 1959.

Immediately upon its appearance in 1940 the book gave deep offence to the ‘totalitarian liberal cohorts’ of the Western intelligentsia. 5 1 Freda had unforgivably become ‘a premature anti-Communist’ and paid a heavy price for her conversion. The Friends of theSoviet Union began to campaign for her deportation, creating a threat which hung over her head for four years. Congressman Jerry Voorhis (1901-84) introduced in March 1941 a private bill ‘for the relief of Freda Utley’ from the provisions of the Alien Registration Act of 1940, a bill which was not finally passed until October 1944. In 1941 Freda had reached a mass audience of over four millions with an article in The Reader’s Digest, pleading for a negotiated peace between England and Germany.52 She thereby incurred the wrath of the administration as well as of the progressive literati. Thus for some years Freda found it difficult to secure contracts from publishers. She was also refused engagements as a lecturer. She did indeed become a member of the department of politics advisory council at Princeton University (1941-47) but she never secured a full-time academic appointment, much as she would have liked to secure such a niche. 5 3

She devoted herself tirelessly to alerting her adopted country to the Communist menace. Inevitably she sympathized with the aims of the America First Movement. She deeply deplored the demand for unconditional surrender adopted in 1944, believing that such a commitment to the total defeat and disarmament of Germany would lead to a second Versailles, with even worse consequences than had followed from the first. Her article of 1944 ‘Why Pick on China’ secured Freda a position as economist and consultant to the Chinese Supply Commission in Washington.54 it enabled her to migrate from New York to the federal capital. In June 1945 The Reader’s Digest published an article entitled ‘The Destiny of the World is being Decided in China.’ The nominal authors were Max Eastman and J B Powell but the true author was Freda Utley. The publisher, DeWitt Wallace (1889-1981), compensated Freda for her sacrifice of credit by appointing her as a correspondent in China. A sojourn of five months (October 1945 – February 1946) resulted in the publication of her first book on the Far East in nine years.55 On that visit Freda became the first woman correspondent to visit Yenan since Anna Louise Strong in 1938. There she was denied an interview with Mao but agreed with the contrast drawn by Tillman Durdin between’the frightened people and the confident commissars’ of Communist China. 56 Freda warned the USA that its China policies, culminating in the ending of the supply of arms to the Nationalists in 1946, had proved utterly disastrous, benefiting only the Communists. The publication of Last Chance in China marked the start of a new phase in Freda’s career, wherein she focused attention upon the question, who was to blame for the loss of China to the Communists? In the anguished national debate which followed, her status was so enhanced that her work was cited as authoritative in a report of 1948 from the House Un-Amen’can Activities Committee.

De Witt Wallace then appointed Freda as a correspondent in Germany, where she arrived in August 1948 after three years of Allied occupation of the country. Her resulting book, The High Cost of Vengeance (1949) was the bravest work she was ever to write: it denounced Allied policy as stupid, wicked, vindictive and disastrous. Her aim was once more didactic, seeking to avoid in Germany a repetition of the

On 22 December 1978 Freda Utley died in Washington, one full year before Soviet power reached its maximum global extent with the invasion of Afghanistan. The collapse of the USSR in 1990-91 was followed by a notable and widespread resurgence of interest in her work. KostspieligeRache (1951), the translation of The HighCostof Vengeance, was reprinted in Germany in 1993. TheChinaStory (1951) was translated into Japanese in 1993. Japan‘s Feet of Clay (1936) was also translated into Japanese in 1998 and was reprinted in the original English in 2000. Lancashire and the Far East had become a classic monograph of economic history and in 1996 was twice reprinted. Her surviving papers in 87 boxes were deposited in the archives of the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, and were catalogued in 1984. No biography has so far appeared, for reasons which must invite speculation.

Possessed by a zest for in-depth research, Freda had spread her energies widely. Her contributions to the history of the USSR, Germany and Asia remain of lasting value. Six of her eight books were translated into eight languages, endowing her with a global readership. Their author never however, secured the recognition which she sought. Disputatious by disposition, she always remained, in Rosa Luxemburg’s phrase, ‘the one who thinks differently’. Thus she became an inevitable opponent in succession of the established regimes in England, Japan, Russia and the USA. Russell Kirk aptly described her as ‘thorny and indomitable… full of reproaches and resentments, possessed of acerbic wit, passionately didactic and remarkably readable.’67 Freda lost her faith in the inevitability of progress and in the perfectibility of man through the improvement of his material conditions. To the end she remained a modem Antigone, consumed by a savage indignation against injustice. Her work was carried on by her son, Jon basil Utley, who had been born in Moscow

(May-June 1951). Freda earned full national recognition as an authority upon China. She became Director of the American-China Policy Association Inc., established in 1946, and gave evidence before the Tydings Committee against Owen Lattimore (1900-1989), as the reputed architect of US policy towards China. 63 Shehadalready supplied Senator McCarthy with the material for his denunciation of Lattimore in his speech on 30 March 1950. She gave evidence before three more Congressional Committees on 11 October 195 1, 1 April 1953 and I July 1954 but concluded that McCarthy’s campaign had been’brief and abortive’.64 Her work did however pen-nit the public identification of such fellow-travellers as J. K. Fairbank, J. E. Johnson and Edgar Snow (1905-72).65

During the year of the Suez Crisis Freda undertook a seven-months tour of Asia (June-December 1956), which brought her back to Japan in August 1956 for the first time since 1938. She had been dismayed by the outburst of anti-Arab sentiment in the New Yorkpress which greeted Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal Company. Believing that the problems of the Middle East resembled those of China, she hoped that the U.S.A. would not make again the same mistakes in its policy. In Will the Middle East Go West?(195 7) she argued that it had alienated Western­ oriented Arabs by its pro-Israeli policy and might push the whole region into the Communist camp. In 1968 she completed the first volume of her autobiography, which covered the adventurous years of her life down to 1945.66 She never however published the second volume, analysing the intricacies of politics in Washington and showing how Senator McCarthy had been captured by the forces of the ultra-right and thereby led to destruction.

(May-June 195 1). Freda earned full national recognition as an authority upon China. She became Director of the American-China Policy Association Inc., established in 1946, and gave evidence before the Tydings Committee against Owen Lattimore (1900-1989), as the reputed architect of US policy towards China. 63 Shehadalready supplied Senator McCarthy with the material for his denunciation of Lattimore in his speech on 30 March 1950. She gave evidence before three more Congressional Committees on 11 October 195 1, 1 April 1953 and I July 1954 but concluded that McCarthy’s campaign had been’brief and abortive’.64 Her work did however pen-nit the public identification of such fellow-travellers as J. K. Fairbank, J. E. Johnson and Edgar Snow (1905-72).65

During the year of the Suez Crisis Freda undertook a seven-months tour of Asia (June-December 1956), which brought her back to Japan in August 1956 for the first time since 1938. She had been dismayed by the outburst of anti-Arab sentiment in the New Yorkpress which greeted Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal Company. Believing that the problems of the Middle East resembled those of China, she hoped that the U.S.A. would not make again the same mistakes in its policy. In Will the Middle East Go West?(1957) she argued that it had alienated Western­ oriented Arabs by its pro-Israeli policy and might push the whole region into the Communist camp. In 1968 she completed the first volume of her autobiography, which covered the adventurous years of her life down to 1945.66 She never however published the second volume, analysing the intricacies of politics in Washington and showing how Senator McCarthy had been captured by the forces of the ultra-right and thereby led to destruction.

On 22 December 1978 Freda Utley died in Washington, one full year before Soviet power reached its maximum global extent with the invasion of Afghanistan. The collapse of the USSR in 1990-91 was followed by a notable and widespread resurgence of interest in her work. KostspieligeRache (1951), the translation of The HighCostof Vengeance, was reprinted in Germany in 1993. TheChinaStory (1951) was translated into Japanese in 1993. Japan‘s Feet of Clay (1936) was also translated into Japanese in 1998 and was reprinted in the original English in 2000. Lancashire and the Far East had become a classic monograph of economic history and in 1996 was twice reprinted. Her surviving papers in 87 boxes were deposited in the archives of the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, and were catalogued in 1984. No biography has so far appeared, for reasons which must invite speculation.

Possessed by a zest for in-depth research, Freda had spread her energies widely. Her contributions to the history of the USSR, Germany and Asia remain of lasting value. Six of her eight books were translated into eight languages, endowing her with a global readership. Their author never however, secured the recognition which she sought. Disputatious by disposition, she always remained, in Rosa Luxemburg’s phrase, ‘the one who thinks differently’. Thus she became an inevitable opponent in succession of the established regimes in England, Japan, Russia and the USA. Russell Kirk aptly described her as ‘thorny and indomitable… full of reproaches and resentments, possessed of acerbic wit, passionately didactic and remarkably readable.’67 Freda lost her faith in the inevitability of progress and in the perfectibility of man through the improvement of his material conditions. To the end she remained a modem Antigone, consumed by a savage indignation against injustice. Her work was carried on by her son, Jon Basil Utley, who had been born in Moscow in 1934. He became chairman from 1998 of Americans Against World Empire and created in 2001 a memorial web-site on the internet dedicated to ‘FredaUtley.com’.

INDEX

The author of all works cited is Freda Utley, unless otherwise

stated. The place of publication of all sources cited is London, unless

otherwise stated.

I .          Odyssey of a Liberal. Memoirs (Washington, D.C., 1970, henceforth

cited as ‘Odyssey), 61

  1. ibid., 74
  2. ibid., 84
  3. ibid., 103
  4. Japan’s Feet of Clay (193 6), 176
  5. Manchester Guardian Commercial, 25 April 1929, 490; 2 May 1929,

517

  1. Lancashire and the Far East (1931), 220.

What’s Wrong with the Cotton Trade? An Explanation of the Present

Depression and the Communist Policy for Cotton Workers (1930), 17.

  1. Lancashire and the Far East, 72, 149.
  2. Odyssey, 305
  3. The Dream We Lost. Soviet Russia Then and Now (New York), 1940,

henceforth cited as ‘Dream’), 3.

  1. Japan’s Feet of Clay, 21, 288. New Statesman, 6 Feb. 1937, 195
  2. Japan’s Feet of Clay, 17, 337.
  3. Kaoru Sugihara, ‘Economic Motivations behind Japanese Aggression

in the late 1930s: Perspectives of Freda Utley and Nawa Toichl’.

Journal of Contemporary History, 32: 2, April 1997, 259-80.

  1. Japan’s Feet of Clay, 36.
  2. The Economist, 26 DEC. 1936, 638. New Statesman, 7 NOV. 1936,

736, Bertrand Russell.

  1. New Statesman 6 March 1937, 365, with a reply by Freda Utley in

idem, 13 March, 403.

  1. New York Times Book Review, 18 April 193 7, 3, W. H. Mallory.
  2. The Spectator, I I DEC. 1936, 1063
  3. Contemporary Japan, 6: 1, June 1937, 95-101, a reference for which I

remain indebted to Dr. Janet Hunter of the L.S.E.

  1. Odyssey, 212
  2. New Statesman, 25 SEPT. 1937, 433, ‘How Japan Could be Stopped’.
  3. Japan’s Gamble in China (1938),103, 114.
  4. Ibid. 282
  5. ibid, 14
  6. Janice R. MacKinnon and Stephen R. MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley.

             The Life and Times of an American Radical (Berkeley, 1988), 208.

  1. Stephen R. MacKinnon and Oris Friesen, China Reporting. An Oral

             History ofAmerican Journalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Berkeley,

1987), 43, citing Agnes Smedley.

  1. Odyssey, 206, 218.
  2. China at War (1939), 52, 189
  3. Odyssey, 222.
  4. San Francisco Chronicle, 27 NOV. 1938, ‘A Woman in China’s War

Zone’.

  1. New Statesman, I July 1939, 20, a review of John Gunther, Inside Asia

             (1939); idem, 27 OCT. 1939, 586, ‘Mrs Chesterton on Russia’.

  1. G. E. Hubbard, Eastern Industrialization and its Effect on the West

             (Oxford, 1935, 1938), 395, 399, 400.

  1. Manchester Guardian, 24 OCT. 1939, 3v, ‘Death from the Skies’.
  2. Dream, 265, 270, 273.
  3. 0. Lattimore, China Memoirs. Chiang Kai-shek and the War against

             Japan, compiled by Fujiko Isono (Tokyo, 1990), 233. Tillman

Durdin, according to MacKinnon & Friesen (op.cit), 40), believed on

the other hand that Freda Utley’s categorical anti-Communism

counterbalanced the left-wing enthusiasm of the united frontists in

Hankow.

  1. Dream, 122
  2. Lattimore, op.cit., 233
  3. Odyssey, 222.
  4. New Statesman, 30 SEPT. 1939, 457, letter. Dream, 145.
  5. Odyssey, 230
  6. Ibid., 255
  7. Lost Illusion (1948), 94.
  8. Dream, 268. Odyssey, 106,137,142.
  9. Dream, 293. Odyssey, 143
  10. Dream, 84
  11. Odyssey, 278
  12. Dream, vii
  13. Ibid., 359, 361
  14. Ibid., 19, 88
  15. MacKinnon and MacKinnon, op.cit., 251 citing Agnes Smedley to

Aino Taylor, 2 Dec. 1942.

  1. Odyssey, 270, 275.
  2. Readers Digest, 39: 235, NOV. 1941, 58-63, ‘Must the World Destroy

Itselff, reprinted from Common Sense, August 1941, ‘God Save

England from her Friends’.

  1. Odyssey, 77
  2. Reader’s Digest, 59: 249, SEPT. 1944, 345-3 5 1, ‘Why Pick on

ChinaT

  1. Last Chance in China (Indianopolis, 1947).
  2. Ibid., 153
  3. The High Cost of Vengeance (Chicago, 1949), 2, 30, 44
  4. Ibid., 9. Two works maybe mentioned as representative reflections of

the wartime mind-set. Germany the Aggressor throughout the Ages

            (1940) was written by F. J. C. Hearnshaw (1869-1946), who had been

Freda Utley’s professor of history at King’s College. The same theme

pervaded The Course of German History (1942) by the radical

socialist, A.J.P. Taylor (1906-91).

  1. The High Cost of Vengeance, 167,185-201. American Mercury, 76,

June 1953, 112-118, ‘Facing the Facts in Germany’. idem, 77, Dec.

1953, 35-39, ‘The Book Burners Burned’. Idem, 79, Nov. 1954, 53­

58, ‘Malmedy and McCarthy’.

  1. The High Cost of Vengeance, 127
  2. The China Story (Chicago, 1951), 130 If
  3. Ibid., 27, 168.
  4. Ibid, 185 American Mercury, 73, Sept. 1951, 101-118, ‘The Case of

Owen Lattimore’. Idem, 80, June 1955, 21-26, ‘The Triumph of

Owen Lattimore’.

  1. Odyssey, 279
  2. Francis X. Gannon, Biographical Dictionary of the Left (Boston),

1969),1, 321, 380, 544-5.

  1. Odyssey of a Liberal. Memoirs (1970)
  2. New York Times Book Review, 75: 16, 19 April 1970, 32, in a review

of Odyssey of a Liberal.

Copyright, 2002, Japan Society